Athletic, Axios talking merger?

Do people here actually flaunt they have more Twitter followers than others? That's some dumb shit.

 

I don't know about that, but Twitter followers is the only metric that matters to The Athletic, so it's at least timely in this thread.

 

Are you serious about that? If so, what do you base that on?

 

They've hired people (at least in part) because they have a lot of Twitter followers. But the most important metric at The Athletic is subscriber conversions.

 

Meaning the % of those who sign up for the free trial and then ante up for the longer term?

 

For the individual writers, it's more about how many non-subscribers click on a story, can't read it, and sign up for a subscription in order to read that. (Our place looks at that too, but it's paramount for a website that claims to be ad-free.)

 

Yeah, no big deal. Not like the SEC just put out a buyer beware warning about SPACs or nothing

 

They hired a Carolina Hurricanes writer who has a shit ton of followers but 75 percent of her tweets are just insane weirdo crap that has nothing to do with hockey and she thinks she is hilarious

 

Who is the grand leader of journalism who decides what is important any more? Fredrick says this way to judge a writer's value is ridiculous. So some consultant thinks a reader of The Athletic reads the first few paragraphs and says, "By gosh I HAVE to read the rest of this story. Sign me up!" Color me skeptical. It'd be so nice to be a consultant and be able to fool so many suits into $$$$.

 

Do you even Google Analytics, bro?

 

Yes that’s actually exactly how it works Frederick. Welcome to content marketing in the 21st century.

But no, go ahead and keep writing 2000 word columns about the hot dogs in the Montreal Forum press box. Because CONTENT!

 

Imagine needing hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers just to get a job.